History of book printing

Contents

1. Introduction…………………………………………………………..2

2. The history of the book printing:

   2.1. Books in the ancient world……………………………………….2

   2.2. Four Important Periods in the History of the Book………………3

   2.3. The Rise of the University………………………………………..6

   2.4. The Development of Print Technology…………………………..8

   2.5. Luther and the Protestant Reformation………………………….11

   2.6. The Rise of Vernacular Languages and Nation States and the Decline of the Roman Catholic Church………………………………..11

   2.7. Libraries…………………………………………………………12

   2.8. Modern printing technology…………………………………….12

3. Conclusion…………………………………………………………..13

4. References…………………………………………………………..14

1. Introduction

A book is one of the greatest wonders of world. Why are so many people fond of reading? The world of books is full of wonders. Together with the characters of books you can find yourself in different and countries have a lot of adventures Reading plays a very important role in the life of people. It educates a person, enriches his intellect. Thanks to books we learn to express our thoughts and feelings more exactly. Through out the centuries books had an enormous influence on the minds and hearts of people. Books bind together ages, personalities. Thanks to books we can talk to people who lived in different countries and ages. Through reading books we hear their voices, thoughts and feelings. So as for me it was very interesting to explore the history of development of the books. When I began to work on this project, my aim was learning and explaining different facts from the history.

In our time reading is substituted for television. Investigators of this problem say that students spend about 2-3 hours a day for watching TV. However, several hundreds years ago the invention of printing was the initial factor that at once changed all conditions of the intellectual life of Western Europe. The history of printing is an important part of the general history of civilization. Printing has been the principal vehicle for the conveying of ideas during the past 500 years.

2. The history of the book printing

2.1. Books in the ancient world

The earliest books were written on tablets of wood or pieces of bark. In Greece and Rome, the tablets of wood were covered with wax, and writing was impressed upon them with a small stick called “stylus”. These tablets were held together on one side with thin strips of leather or metal rings. In Assyria and Babylonia clay tablets were used for writing and the words were drawn with a piece of wood. After baking, the tablets were kept on shelves, just like books are kept today. Although the clay tablets didn’t look very beautiful, they were long-lasting and some of them survived until the present day. The earliest books of ancient world were written on papyrus and skins of young animals. These books took the form of long strip, rolled from one cylinder to another. The old scrolls or rolled books were still popular even after the invention of the bound book. The word for scroll was VOLVMEN in Latin (the second 'V' makes a long 'U' sound) and the word for a bound book was CODEX. It is from these words that we get our own words for encyclopedia volume and law codes. By the end of the Third Century, most books were of the CODEX kind with a few very ornate public documents still produced in the form of a VOLVMEN. For personal use and for short notes that would be erased later, they used small wax tablets. These were usually bound together on a leather thong or arranged to fold together like modern book covers or like an accordion.

The individual tablets were made of wood and had a raised edge, forming a shallow box. Into this box, molten wax was poured and allowed to cool with a smooth surface. This wax was usually a deep red or reddish brown in color. A metal or bone STILVS (stylus) was used to write upon the tablet, the pointed end to make the letters and the flattened end to smooth over and "erase" writing that was no longer wanted. These folding tablets and styli were the standard writing materials for Roman schoolchildren. They went by many names. In Latin they were called cerae or codices.

Though paper has been known in China since the first century, the secret of papermaking came to Europe much later.

Books were quite common in ancient Rome: we know that there were many booksellers and the first public library was founded there about 39 B.C. Only the rich could buy books or make their slaves copy books from important libraries.

2.2. Four Important Periods in the History of the Book

I. 7th to 13th Century: The age of religious "manuscript" book production. Books in this period are entirely constructed by hand, and are largely religious texts whose creation is meant as an act of worship.

II. 13th to 15th Century: The secularization of book production. Books are beginning to be produced that do not serve as objects of worship, but that try to explain something about the observable world. The difficulty with the spread of such knowledge is that production is still taking place via pre-print - manuscript - methods.

The production of secular books is driven by two things:

     The rise of universities in Europe, spreading from Italy.

     The return of the crusaders in the 13th century, who bring with them texts from Byzantium. These books, written during the Greek and Roman periods in history, focus on this-world concerns.

III. 15th to 16th Century: The first printed books. These are print versions of traditional works like the Bible, books of hours (prayer books) and the religious calendars.

IV. 16th to 17th Century: New information is put into books that has important consequences for European life and society.

Authors like Elizabeth Eisenstein, who say that print had a massive effect in European culture, are looking at the differences between periods II and III above. Febvre and Martin see other factors as more important because they are looking at the differences between periods I and IV above.

The 7th to the 9th century was the heyday of the "illuminated manuscript". Production of these works took place in the monasteries scattered across Europe. These religious retreats were the repositories of those texts of Greece and Rome which survived in Europe. They were also the seats of the intellectual life of Europe during the Middle Ages. Monks in the monasteries made copies of the books in their care - both religious and secular manuscripts. However, they did not contribute much more to the advancement of that intellectual tradition, because they were not engaged in thinking about the relationship between the works in their care and the world outside the monastery.

During this time, the production of Bibles was the place where the arts of the monastic scribes, and later lay artists, flowered. It was here that the most elaborate and beautiful illumination found its outlet and the manuscript books from this period represent the height of the art of decoration.

One of the most beautiful examples of an illuminated manuscript is the Irish Book of Kells: "a large-format manuscript codex of the Latin text of the gospels" (Meehan 1994:9). The image shown here is an eight-circle cross - one of the central motifs of this manuscript, all of which focus on aspects of Christ's life and message. According to Meehan, the Book of Kells is the most lavishly decorated of any manuscript produced between the 7th and 9th centuries.

The most important thing about the manuscript books of this period is that they were objects of religious veneration. They were seen as consecrated objects. Their creation was an act of religious devotion. The monks who sat for years, working on single chapters of the Bible, were not reproducing books. They were making the word of God manifest in the world.

The style of these books is very different from anything we are used to reading. They are not meant to be a collection of words that convey information from an author to the reader. Their primary function is to serve as decoration which pays tribute to the word of God. In an illuminated manuscript, the complexity of the decoration was intended to mirror the complexity of the biblical passages the decoration illustrates. Just as Biblical text is open to many different interpretations, the illumination of that text was intended to pose the same allusive and meditative possibilities. (Meehan 1994:16)

This is the "carpet page" from the Book of Durrow, created around 680 A.D. The woven pattern on this page is called "interlace" and exhibits both zoomorphic and abstract elements in its design.

The detail of the interlace in the Book of Durrow is more refined by the time the illuminators get to the creation of the Book of Kells. In the Book of Durrow, the interlace covers the page, in the Book of Kells, it becomes part of larger images.

In this detail from the Book of Kells, showing the heads of lions and chalices spouting vines, we can more clearly see the zoomorphic aspects of the interlace.

However, in interlacing, the interweaving of the bodies of snakes and lions, of peacock and fishes, chalices and vines, is not intended to be a naturalistic representation of the existing world. These images are schematic and symbolic. The elements of the work are chosen from a repertoire of marks and usable images and themes; a set collection of pre-agreed upon symbols, forms, and images. The images are meant to represent some aspect of Christ's life: the snake representing rebirth (in the shedding of its skin) and, at the same time, Original Sin; the peacock representing the incorruptibility of Christ (a reflection of the ancient belief that the flesh of a peacock is incorruptible) (Meehan 1994:50,53,59).

We think of modern books as being illustrated, but the illustration and photographs, the images, are usually distinct from the text. In these early manuscripts dedicated to God, the two were not so separate.              

2.3. The Rise of the University

An important event of the 12th and 13th centuries is the rise of a merchant class; a social and economic group whose function in the world is to move merchandise from one locale to another - who make their living buying and selling goods, instead of making things or growing food. A rising merchant class and a new rise of cities, also meant a rising interest in the outside world.

The first European university was founded in Bologna, Italy in 1119. Universities were established in Siena in 1203 and Vincenza in 1204. By the end of the 13th century, universities had been established in Paris, Bologna, Padua, Ghent, Oxford, Cambridge. These were major sites for the institution of a new relationship to books, to learning, and to the Word of God. These were important institutions because, prior to the advent and rise of the university, learning in Europe had been dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. In many cases, the university consisted of lecturers who lived in the town. If a group of people wanted a class they would go hire a lecturer and pay him to give a series of lectures.

These new centers of learning created new demands for books. These students didn't have access to the books locked away in monastaries. so they had no access to books. With the rise of this new form of learning, they needed access to new kinds of books not readily available - e.g. non-religious texts. So the university created a system of demand for books as well as a system for the use of books in ways not used with religious texts. This effect of the university on book production is what Febvre and Martin take as more revolutionary than the advent of the printing press. Two new kinds of institutions grew up around the universities to provide for that demand: stationers and book copiers. These folks provided paper and libraries of text books that had been carefully studied and compared to other books for accuracy. They made these books available for copying by students. There are several problems with this mode of book production. The most obvious is that inaccuracies get introduced as the book gets copied. Second, stationers may try to get accurate copies of the texts, but they have no way to really know how accurate their copies were. The combination of these factors lead to a compounding of inaccuracies in the texts people used. Mistakes get compounded as copiers get tired, bored, or simply pass along mistakes they don't catch. Books needed were not just religious texts so much as books on more secular subjects:

     The first book on Surgery, the Chirurgi Magna was written in 1363.

     Canterbury Tales is written sometime between 1387 and Chaucer's death in 1400.

It is also possible to see the beginning of the shift to secular concerns in religious works. The themes of the works are still religious but the secular world is beginning to intrude on the borders. Even quasi-religious books begin to show non-religious aspects of life: more realistic looking people and artifacts.

Despite the lack of perspective in the medieval images on these pages, we can see that the book is becoming a repository for naturalistic study of plants and animals. The borders of the pages include images that look like real plants, and there are rabbits at the bottom of "Meeting at the Garden Gate."

In the Book of Kells there is an other-worldly truth. In these works, we see a this-worldly presentation. Similar themes show up in other religious texts.

The creators of these works are also beginning to include images of their own social world. In this manuscript, the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, produced in 1140, there is a picture of the Holy Family with Christ in a walker. But this is not an image of the Roman-era, it is a 15th century image - a vernacular culture scene - that would look familiar to the reader of the work.

In this period there is also the beginning of the divorce of image from text/writing. The image here shows the letter "Q" - it is still decoration, but it looks more like modern decorated text than medieval text.

And there is a new kind of realism. Religious images begin to look more like what we would see today, with a more modern notion of both perspective and scene - with the sheep and the dogs in the picture with the angels and the shepherds.

In other texts like the Tacuinum Sanitatis, published in the 10th century, there is a clear image of the real world, without any religious significance. Here we have production and reproduction. From this book people could learn about the real world outside their houses.

For all the changes in this period, Eisenstein is also correct that the inaccuracies in available texts created problems for the advancement of European knowledge. First it was difficult to locate books. You could get the books needed for a particular university class, but you might not be able to get your hands on copies of other texts you might need to do independent research. In addition, mistakes get compounded as books get made from copies of copies. So Eisenstein is right on some points, the rise of the university created a demand, but the technology of the time stifled it as well.

2.4. The Development of Print Technology

In the Mid-15th Century, things begin to change with the advent of the printing press. In 1452, Gutenberg conceives of the idea for movable type. In his workshop, he brings together the technologies of paper, oil-based ink and the wine-press to print books.

Johannes Gutenberg was a German goldsmith and inventor best known for the Gutenberg press, an innovative printing machine that used movable type. Gutenberg was born between 1394 and 1400 and died in 1468. In 1438, Gutenberg began a business arrangement with Andreas Dritzehn, who funded his experiments in printing. In 1450, Gutenberg began a second arrangement with German businessman Johannes Fust. Fust lent Gutenberg the money to start a printing business and build a large Gutenberg Press, their printing projects included the now famous Gutenberg Bible. The printing press is not a single invention. It is the aggregation in one place, of technologies known for centuries before Gutenberg. The other inventions brought together by Gutenberg in his pursuit of a printing press were:

     The adaptation for printing, of the wine or olive oil, screw-type press that had been in use for hundreds of years, throughout Europe and Asia.

     The adaptation of block-print technology - known in Europe since the return of Marco Polo from Asia at the end of the 13th century.

     The development of mass production paper-making techniques. Paper was brought from China to Italy in the 12th C. but was thought too flimsy for books.

The early printers were not only craftsmen, but also editors, publishers and booksellers. The first printing press in England was set up by William Caxton at Westminster in 1476, and the first printing press in Russia – by Ivan Fedorov in Moscow in 1564.

The development of oil-based inks

These had been around since the 10th century, but smeared on the vellum used to make books. The religious manuscripts used an egg-based tempura. This was unsuitable for printing with type. Gutenberg's contribution to printing was the development of a punch and mold system which allowed the mass production of the movable type used to reproduce a page of text. These letters would be put together in a type tray which was then used to print a page of text. If a letter broke down, it could be replaced. When the printing of the copies of one page was finished, the type could be reused for the next page or the next book.

These technological improvements stretch across five centuries. They do not cluster around Gutenberg's time. But the advent of the printing press did not bring about a great shift in the social organization of learning in Europe. The first books to show up in print shops were bibles and religious tracts. The next books to attract publishers were the "humanist" texts brought back from Byzantium by the Crusades, and other texts of antiquity but there was little or no printing of new ideas. Many people went into the printing business and went right back out again. The reason was that the distribution of books was poorly organized.

In addition, there was still a low literacy rate in Europe. Most people did not know how to read at all. But non-literates were still affected by the book trade because the elites, who controlled society, were affected by books. The situation was improved by the introduction of the Frankfort Book Faire. Frankfort was an early center for printing and so it sponsored a book fair which drew publishers, booksellers, collectors, scholars, who could find what they needed for their livelihoods. This helped coordinate supply and demand.

Early print books were conservative in content, and were filled with medieval images and ideas.

This is "Fate" from Ship of Fools from the 16th century. It is a cartoon, meant to show how people's lives go up and down. Note that it shows life and fortune as a circle. In the modern world, we would more likely plot the vagaries of existence on a graph.